The two guys shook my hand and left. I had another coffee as I read through the file they’d left. The sales director was thirty-seven, obviously Thai-Chinese, slightly overweight with chubby cheeks and looking full of confidence. He lived in a landed property, which meant there was money in the family. I just hoped there weren’t too many relatives carrying firearms.
In the afternoon I wandered down to my outside office, the clump of tables at Soi 13 where I sat and chewed the fat with Big Nong, whose aunt served Thai whiskey and Singha beer throughout the night. Big Nong was one of my most reliable part-time assistants. He was reliable, he didn’t drink and he spent most evenings at home with his two children. He used to work the night shift with his aunt, selling alcohol and cigarettes to the local bargirls, but then his wife discovered how much the bargirls who frequented the place earned and she joined their throngs herself, selling her body in a local beer bar and leaving him with the kids. He was a huge guy, and while he was very much a gentle giant he intimidated the hell out of everyone he met. At the nearby motorcycle taxi rank was a butch lesbian motorcycle taxi girl by the name of Nok who agreed to help me on the surveillance job for 500 baht a day.
The next morning I was at a small restaurant at the head of the soi close to the head offices of the shipping company, drinking Cokes with Big Nong. Nok was parked close by on her Honda. I had arranged for Stewart to phone me on my mobile as soon as Gung got ready to leave the office. As no phone call was forthcoming, Big Nong, Nok and I ordered a noodle lunch. My phone rang just as I was sprinkling dried chillies over my bowl of noodles; Gung was on his way out.
Nok got back on her Honda and I put on a helmet and climbed onto the back of Big Nong’s bike.
Gung’s Toyota drove slowly down the soi and indicated left. We followed him, keeping well back. The traffic was light so we had no trouble keeping him in sight, but five minutes down the main road and he turned onto the Bangna freeway, which meant that we couldn’t follow him. A five hour wait and we’d lost him in five minutes.
I remembered that Gung’s home was out Bangna way so we headed out there. Sure enough, we saw his car parked outside.
I left Nok to keep an eye on his place and got Big Nong to take me home. According to the information Holden had given me, Gung’s mobile phone was from one of the big companies and as luck would have it I had a contact there who, for a few thousand baht, would give me a list of all numbers received and called. I phoned my contact and he promised to drop the information around next day.
The following morning Big Nong and I were at the restaurant near the head office again. Big Nong had been told that a policeman owned the restaurant and I figured it wouldn’t be too long before the staff started to wonder what we were up to. I got my defence in first and told one of the waitresses that my wife worked in an office down the road and that I thought she was having an affair with one of her colleagues. I got lots of sympathetic smiles from the waitresses after that.
Gung left the office at ten o’clock and we followed him towards Klong Toey Port. He spent an hour there and then we tailed him to an office block in Chinatown. Then he went home again. I checked the addresses against the customer list that Holden had given me. There were no matches. That could have meant he was drumming up new business for the firm, or that there was something going on that his employers didn’t know about. One thing was for sure, he wasn’t working hard. A couple of hours in the office in the morning, a couple of business calls, then home. However much Stewart was paying the guy, it was too much.
On the third day Gung visited two more firms that weren’t on Holden’s list and one that was a major client of the firm, then spent three hours in a short-time hotel in Soi 3 with a very pretty girl who clearly wasn’t his wife. I fired off half a dozen long-range pictures with my telephoto lens as they left.
I spent the afternoon at the Company Registrar on Ratchada Road. There’s a civil servant there that I’ve used on several occasions, so I slipped him Gung’s full name and date of birth and a 500-baht note. He ran the details through the databases and found that Gung was a director of half a dozen companies, all based in Bangkok. I took the list to the nearest Starbucks and compared the directorships with the addresses that Gung had visited over the past couple of days. There were two that matched: one was the office in Chinatown and the other was in Silom, close to the Patpong red-light district. Both companies were freight forwarders, in direct competition with Stewart’s business. Gung had joined the boards of both companies five years before he started working for Stewart. Bingo. It was obvious what was going on. Gung had joined Stewart’s company with the sole intention of poaching his clients.
I didn’t have proof, of course. But over the course of the week Gung spent more time visiting his own companies and his minor wife than he did attending to Stewart's customers. And one of the firm's that Gung had visited didn't renew its contract with Stewart's company. I made a phone call, posing as a potential customer, and got the name of the freight forwarder they were now using. No surprises there. It was one of Gung's companies.
I gave the information to Stewart and they sacked Gung a few days later. He made noises about suing them for breach of contract, but the photographs of him leaving the short-time hotel with his mistress put paid to that.
There's a Chinese expression about not breaking someone else's rice bowl, and I had definitely broken Gung's. I insisted that Stewart and Holden didn't reveal my involvement in the case, but over the next few days I still found myself ducking when motorcyclists pulled up next to me. Thailand truly is the Land of Smiles but it's also the Land of Hitmen on Motorcycles.
THE CASE OF THE MILLION-BAHT BARGIRL
I’ve never understood why so many tourists end up sending money back to their temporary girlfriends when they go home. It makes no sense to me. Paying and playing while you’re in Thailand is all well and good, but why pay when you’re thousands of miles away? My bread and butter work is checking up on bargirls. And nine times out of ten, the client is a love-struck farang wanting me to check that his beloved isn’t doing what she was doing when he met her. There is a theory that sex tourists check in their brains on arrival at the airport, but there’s no excuse for long-term residents of the Land of Smiles to be shelling out money to bargirls. Anyone who lives here really should know better. You’ve only got to sit down at one of the beer bars at the entrance to Nana Plaza to see what goes on. Motorcycles buzz up with a pretty young thing on the back. The girl totters into the plaza to start work, the boyfriend drives off to play pool with his friends. After the bars have closed, the guy drives back and picks up the girl and off they go to spend her hard-earned cash. The girls are hookers hooking and they’re not going to stop doing that just because some guy thousands of miles away starts sending her a few thousand baht each month.
Guys who live here know how it works, which is why I was so surprised when I met Yves. And even more surprised when I heard what the daft sod had done. He phoned me on my mobile and said that he’d heard good things about me from a couple of guys I’d worked for. It’s always nice to get a word-of-mouth recommendation rather than a client who has just seen one of the stickers I put on every ATM machine I use. Yves was French, very well spoken and clearly upper class so I put on my best shirt and tie and went around to his office for a chat. Well, not his office, actually. He was a bit wary about being seen with a private eye, so we met in a nearby Starbucks.
I got there twenty minutes early which gave me time for a look around, but he turned up on his own and looked every bit as French as he’d sounded on the phone. He was a small man in his early forties, his hair starting to grey at the temples, fairly good looking and looking dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer, grey slacks and dark brown shoes with tassels on them. He bought a couple of coffees and then told me his story.
He’d been in Thailand for most of his life. His father had been involved in the shipping business at the time of the legendary Jim Thompson, and on occasions they’d done business together. Thompson is just about the most famous farang in Thailand; he pretty much single-handedly set up the country’s silk exporting business before disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
Yves had met several members of the Thai Royal Family and had married a Thai woman from a high-class background. She was now on the family estate in Pyrenees raising their three children. Yves travelled back and forth between France and Thailand, though he admitted that the Bangkok office pretty much ran itself. It soon became clear why Yves was spending so much time in the Land of Smiles. He was a frequent visitor to Patpong, one the city’s main red-light districts. Being married hadn’t stopped him fooling around and, with his wife in France, his sex
